I've been trying to articulate why the fawning, complimentary responses from AI chatbots feel so insidious to me. I've finally figured out how to explain it. Wrote a long piece on how current model training and design choices threaten our critical thinking skills: maggieappleton.com/ai-enlighten...

Welcome to Bluesky @automerge.org I'm glad you're consistent and not conflicted.

Want to hear about the latest in Automerge? Come join the Community Call Kickoff on August 20 (and sign up for the calendar while you're at it!) lu.ma/zv6tpuu4

One more week to submit to LIVE, one of my favourite conferences! Let's see your "new user interfaces that improve the immediacy, usability, and learnability of programming" liveprog.org

Automerge 3 is here: the heart transplant is complete! Huge improvements in memory usage and (in most cases) correspondingly big performance improvements too. Backwards compatible on disk and the network so there's no reason not to upgrade today: automerge.org/blog/automer...

Know anyone applying to this? 👀

Are you sync curious? lu.ma/sync-london syncconf.dev

We had @geoffreylitt.com join us in Toronto back in 2023. Today he’s releasing the Malleable Software essay with the @inkandswitch.com team.

New longform @inkandswitch.com essay! 📜 Malleable Software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps by me, @joshuahhh.com, @pvh.ca and @seaofclouds.com inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea... It's about why people need agency over their software tools, and how to make that happen.

As a kid, I learned to program in HyperCard, a fantastic thing from Apple in the 1990s which empowered normal people to make homemade software. Last fall @pontus.granstrom.me started exploring and reinterpreting these ideas for 2025. Excited to share our writeup: pontus.granstrom.me/scrappy/

New thing! @jrcpl.us and I have been exploring home-made software. We made a prototype of a tool for making scrappy little apps for you and your friends. pontus.granstrom.me/scrappy/

If you’re in NYC and curious about checking out Folk Computer we’re having another open house event Saturday, May 31! lu.ma/ydi03zax

Check out the first of @grjte.sh posts about combining #localfirst software - using @inkandswitch.com’s Automerge + Tiny Essay Editor - with ATProto for Lexicon data typing and public distribution. I’m excited to read all the write ups about the Groundmist project!

if you'll be in Berlin for @localfirstconf.com and are sticking around after... the Userandagents.com community is hosting a casual space for #localfirst people to hang / hack / chat for the Thurs/Fri after the conference! registration and more info: lu.ma/v457jxp2

Our new research track is called Universal Version Control and it's about exploring how to bring the power of version control to every person, on every kind of document and every kind of collaboration. www.inkandswitch.com/universal-ve...

For anyone going to @localfirstconf.com, don’t forget about the pre-conference Localfirst community day lu.ma/v8ggp0u9?tk=...

ONE WEEK UNTIL THE LONDON ALGORAVE You can buy a ticket here for an early bird price before it goes up tomorrow lu.ma/ig4y8mii - Ticket revenue goes towards venue and artists - Event is listed in two places for maximum reach and inclusion! please only buy in one place :) - The night will be good

Excited to share this blogpost with y'all! expertofobsolescence.substack.com/p/the-hard-t...

Notes from the Lab - March 2025 Custom HTML attributes, space transforms, peer-to-peer WebRTC + DOM sync, and much more! github.com/folk-systems...

This is the logo for a new Ink & Switch research track. What are your guesses for the name of this research area?

I recently had a great chat with @rebeccahiscott.bsky.social at the Creative Independent. You can read the interview here…

The first Sync SF is happening on Monday, March 17th https://lu.ma/sync-sf ​Kyle Mathews - Electric, Gatsby ​Sam Bhagwat - Mastra, Gatsby ​J Chris Anderson - Fireproof, Couchbase ​Natalie Vais - Google Firestore, Spark Capital ​Jack McCloy - Snowflake ​Yonatan Feleke - Vella, lofi.software

What if hypertext were zoomable? Then you could zoom forever, in circles... I made this the other day and came up with a data structure that allows the coordinate origin to move through the graph, to keep memory fixed and avoid floating point precision limits. folk.systems/canvas/space...

There are folks in the @causalislands.com orbit that have been talking about this for several years. Here’s a presentation by @geoffreylitt.com who is exploring malleable software youtu.be/bJ3i4K3hefI

I've got until @localfirstconf.com in May to really figure out how to explain this thing. It's a Smalltalk. It's a substrate. It's a janky research prototype that throws minified react errors and takes thirty seconds to load until the new Automerge upgrades land (which should help a lot!)

Local-First Conf is back! Tickets are now officially on sale: localfirstconf.com Join us on May 27th - 28th for two days of insights, learning, fun, and chat. We hope to see you there

Are you ready? 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️ The Call for Papers for #Oredev2025 opens in just a few days! More info on how to prepare on our website! 👉 oredev.org/callforpaper

I just published my weekly reflections: docs.google.com/document/d/1... . IA, not AI. Liquid media. Fossils of ideas. Qualitative nuance at quantitative scale. System 3. Poor winter child. Digital collateral. Open Attested Runtime Fabric. Insatiable social vortexes. Intellectual mosquitoes.

New talk video, from @causalislands.com Berlin, where I speak about user agency, a new client for the web, and the web applets protocol www.youtube.com/watch?v=wK_n...

📡 at very long last, today is the big day! my beloved book, OTHER NETWORKS: A RADICAL TECHNOLOGY SOURCEBOOK, is officially available for pre-order! 1/5 #othernetworks shop.mexicansummer.com/merch/495898...

If you're in San Francisco this coming weekend, there's a #localfirst hack day which is full up, but they do have room for people who just want to come to end of day demos.

Introducing Web Applets, Rupert Manfredi @ruperts.world Web Applets are a new open standard for allowing language models to use rich, graphical software, built upon the web. They are small, local-first, interoperable bits of software that can be used and read by both a human and a machine.

big fan of interconnected.org so it was cool to see a web applets shout-out yesterday! this is was a good write-up on the importance of open standards as we build out this new ecosystem for information & apps interconnected.org/home/2025/02...

Oh, and @mrogalski.eu is of course on here now, sorry about missing that! Thanks for presenting, and now we have this great video to share.

Snappy Animations - numerical tricks for low-latency visual feedback, Marek Rogalski A bunch of tricks that will bring your animations to the next level. We’ll focus on the use of animations in user interfaces - where it’s critical to squeeze every millisecond out of the input latency.

Coming soon to Kosmik 🪄

Death of the Tadi Web, Lu Wilson @todepond.com The tadi web was a ridiculous plan to map out and combine every single 'better computing' movement into one practice.

1/ here's a visual model for how AI support makes me better at UI prototyping with the surprising conclusion that AI may *improve* code quality in some specific cases! lets walk thru it step by step...

a lil snippet of my @dweb.bsky.social demo from yesterday ft. schema interop: bi-directional realtime sync between two local-first apps ✨ full talk coming soon :)

Clip: @genmon.fyi's multi cursor website as an example of how to compute as a group. @paul-rony.bsky.social "Any layer on the computer should be a playground for all of the users. Should be doable with what we have today"

From groups to individuals, micro-computing and us, Paul Rony @paul-rony.bsky.social Computers were designed and invented for groups (The Alto at the PARC were linked by an ethernet local network, the NLS was an on-line collaborative system, etc).

An experimental "super web app" (SWA) launcher in Tauri that flips on IWA and controlled-frame features in Chromium.

The videos for Causal Islands Berlin are being released. Stay tuned for more. Thank you to @gitbutler.com, @tldraw.com, and Kosmik @paul-rony.bsky.social for sponsoring!

We had @raz.bsky.social from @basictech.bsky.social sponsor snacks & drinks at our SF tiny talks last year. Join the SF @dweb.bsky.social crew this Tuesday.

I have two things to share with you today. First, we're starting a publishing company. Second, I wrote a book about computing, which you can preorder starting today!

early bird tickets up for Local First Conf Berlin www.localfirstconf.com

Ok, just sent all video files to an editor. Sorry for the delay on this, we hope to have things in a couple of weeks

Gregor @watwa.re came to Causal Islands Berlin back in October. He’s going to be running some meetups in #Berlin around topics of interest to our community. First one in two weeks, sign up 👇

the hermetic, self-hosted, self-sustainable, recursively exportable, offline-first, file-first, web-based reactive open-source programming substrate built on observable runtime is online finally! tomlarkworthy.github.io/lopecode/web... I am hoping I can explain parts at @hytradboi.bsky.social 🤞